Patterns of Collective Violence
My Honors College Lecture
In West Virginia University’s Honors College, unusually bright and motivated students get special courses developed just for them by a rotating cast of faculty fellows. This year I’m a fellow and teaching an honors course on collective violence — hence many recent Bullfish Hole posts on that topic.
One of the strings of this program is that I had to give a public lecture on my course topic. Here is the text of the talk, slightly edited and with some references added.
My subject today is collective violence. By violence I mean physical force against people and property, such as beating, stabbing or shooting a person, or smashing up and burning down their home. By collective I mean carried out by a group, whether it’s a mob that spontaneously forms in the streets or some kind of standing organization with regular members.
Collective violence is a very broad topic. It happens in every human society and can include everything from fraternity hazing up to World War 2. So let us narrow things down a little further.
We’re looking at violence in American history, from the colonial period up through the 20th century. And we’re focusing on violence by civilian groups rather than by the state. This cuts out foreign wars, the civil war, and violence by the police or legal system. It leaves us with things like lynch mobs, vigilante organizations, family feuds, terrorism, and riots.
Even narrowing things down in this way, there’s still staggering amount and variety of violent behavior. History, like as not, is soaked in blood. And one of the strangest things about much of this violent history is how forgotten it is. Americans often have collective amnesia about collective violence.
I am of two minds about whether or not this is a good thing. Forgetting can be functional, part of how people and societies heal, something that allows the families of the victims and the families of the perpetrators to go on living together without constant fear and retaliation.
On the other hand, there’s the old cliché that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Those of us with the good fortune to live relatively peaceful lives in relatively peaceful times may do well to understand how lucky we are, and to recall how easy it is for peace to be shattered, how naturally the human animal seems to gravitate toward the mob, and how cruel the mob can be.
As someone with a scientific interest in violence, the choice for me is obvious. I find this stuff fascinating and worthy of discussion, understanding, and explanation. So, in the remainder of this talk I’ll outline a few major types and patterns of collective violence in American history. Then I’ll talk about some sociological factors that help us understand and explain it.
Lynching
First, consider lynching. The term lynching traditionally refers to mob justice — some sort of violent extralegal punishment. People nowadays tend think of it mainly in terms of lethal punishment, especially execution by hanging. But here I’m going to define it a bit more broadly to include nonlethal violence as well, such as beating or mutilating the victim without killing him.
In doing this I’m following historian and sociologist Roberta Senechal de la Roche, who distinguishes the pure type of lynch mob from other forms of vigilante justice by its low degree of organization.1 The punishment is carried out by a temporary, informally organized group with fluid membership — a mob that forms, attacks, and dissolves.
She also distinguishes lynching from other kinds of mob violence in that it punishes one or a few people for something they’re personally accused of doing.
She points out that by this sort of mob justice happens in every part of the world throughout human history.2 In Qing China peasant villagers might form a mob to kill someone for theft. Peasants in medieval Europe would sometimes execute people accused of being werewolves — some of whom might have been actual serial killers whose behavior was understood in a supernatural way. In the modern world, you still get lynchings of alleged witches and sorcerers in the rural parts of India, Ghana, and Papua New Guinea, as well as the lynching of alleged thieves, rapists, and murderers throughout sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Latin America.
And you find such mob justice in America as early as colonial times. In these early days it was relatively restrained, more aimed at humiliation than physical damage. The targets of mob violence might be tarred and feathered, or beaten and whipped, but they were rarely killed.3
Things began to change in the 1800s. The word lynching itself first comes into use around the early nineteenth century, and at first it still tends to mean whipping and exiling rather than killing. But as the century goes on it becomes more routine for mobs to kill their victims.
One famous victim in the early 1800s is the prophet Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon faith. After the governor of Illinois has him arrested for unlawfully silencing an opposition newspaper, an angry mob stormed the jail and shot him to death.
He was lucky to die by gunfire. Many lynch mobs preferred hanging — which, without proper gallows, meant a relatively slow death by strangulation. Still other mobs burnt their victims. For example, in 1836 a black freeman was arrested for stabbing two police officers in St. Louis, Missouri. He was held in the jail for mere hours before a mob dragged him to the edge of town and burned him to death.
The real heyday of lethal lynching came after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Between 1880 and 1930 between 4,000 and 5,000 American were killed by lynch mobs.4 Lynching happened in every region of the country, but the large majority of cases occurred in the South. And the large majority of these involve mobs killing a black person who has been accused of some crime or offense against a white person.
The most common accusations were murder or rape — serious crimes, so perhaps we can understand the outrage that drove the mob, even if we are appalled by its actions. But in some cases, black people were killed for violations of the racial caste system that we wouldn’t even consider wrongs. Sexual relationships across the color line were forbidden, and even having too good a job could be dangerous for a black man in the Jim Crow South.
This pattern probably isn’t very surprising to anyone with a cursory knowledge of American history, and the role of racism in the segregated South is obvious. What is less obvious and more surprising to many is that it wasn’t the whole story.
Even in the South, hundreds of white people died by lynching as well, and there were many cases of white people lynched by white mobs, black people lynched by black mobs, and even a few cases of white mobs lynching a white person for an offense against a black person.5 The Southern predilection for mob justice went beyond just enforcing the caste system.
After the South, the region of the country that had the second highest frequency of lynching was the West. Indeed, to some the term lynching is synonymous with frontier justice. In frontier towns where the legal system was weak or unreliable, communities often decided to handle alleged thieves or killers on their own.
Back in the 19th century, when Los Angeles was just a dusty town of 6,000 people, there were thirty lynchings over the course of 20 years.6 One can find approving newspaper articles from California to Arizona to Oklahoma celebrating these violations of due process as justice well done. And the frontier spirit persisted well after the frontier was closed, with mobs hanging infamous outlaws in Oklahoma well into the 20th century.
Vigilante Groups
Sometimes rough justice on the frontier was more organized. Rather than just a temporary mob, people formed standing vigilante organizations with formal membership and official leadership. Like lynch mobs they mostly concerned themselves with punishing particular individuals accused of particular offenses, but they were an ongoing enterprise that would punish many individuals over years or decades.7
The popular term for these vigilante movements differed across time and region. Some were called regulators. Perhaps the earliest group of regulators arose in South Carolina in the 1760s, where frontiersmen formed a company led by a captain to deal with theft by groups of roving bandits.
It’s notable that the violence of these early regulators was less severe than that of later generations of vigilantes. Like other kinds of mob violence in the 1700s and early 1800s, it usually involved beating, humiliating, and perhaps exiling the victim rather than executing him.8
Vigilante groups remained a prominent part of the American frontier as it expanded Westward. As the cotton frontier of the Deep South moved through Alabama and Mississippi, the groups became known as slickers, a term that would be found as far north as Missouri. People even began to use the word slicking to refer to extralegal punishment. Initially these were nonlethal punishments like whipping or tarring and feathering, but over time slickers increasingly turned to execution as well.
In the decade before the Civil War the practice remained, but the fashionable term now was vigilance committee. Vigilance committees hanged horse thieves in Texas, while the San Francisco Vigilance Committee, with over 600 members, was for several months the main authority in the city. All told it executed eight people, whipped and banished dozens more, and even put the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court on trial for corruption.
After the Civil War, a new group formed in war-torn Tennessee. The Ku Klux Klan was initially formed as a social club by bored Confederate veterans, but soon became a tool for cleaning up their community of elements they saw as noxious.
After their turn to violence, imitation chapters sprung up throughout the South. Though they lacked any central leadership or national organization, the various Klan dens had similar modes of operation. They would conduct private trials in which they discussed the behavior of potential targets and whether it merited a violent punishment.
The Klansmen would attack people for various crimes and offenses, from theft to public drunkenness to wife battering. But a great deal of what they considered intolerable had do with supporting black civil rights, Republican politics, or other Reconstruction policies, and so some historians would class their violence not just as vigilantism but also as insurrection. And though their usual activities involved punishing individuals one or two at a time, they would occasionally lead rioting mobs or join in with local militias for larger-scale violence.
Rioting
Judge Lynch has little time for due process. He can be quite credulous about accusations, and sometimes his standards of provocation are shockingly low. But in the classic lynching the focus is on punishing some particular individuals, and this at least limits the scale of the violence in any particular incident. A full-blown riot, on the other hand, involves more widespread and indiscriminate attacks.
The rioting mob is like the lynch mobs in that it’s a loosely organized and temporary group, a mob without formal membership or leadership. And like a lynch mob, riots are often rooted in some grievance, some alleged crime or injustice that leads outraged people to take to the streets in anger.9
But unlike the lynch mob, the rioters direct their ire at all members of a social category — such as a race or religion or nationality or social class — with no regard for whether the people they attack or whose homes and businesses they destroy had anything to do with whatever caused their outrage. They might attack, beat, hang, stab or shoot any member of the enemy category they see in public, pulling them from cars or buses on their way home from work. And they might vandalize or burn down entire neighborhoods or business districts.
Just like lynching, rioting in America goes back to colonial times, and like lynching and vigilantism, the version of it we see amongst the English settlers in that period is relatively restrained — far less violent than what will come later in history. Things historians call “riots” in this period were usually pretty small in scale and rarely resulted in fatalities.10
As the population of American cities grew in size and diversity, the violence grew in scale and severity. Waves of immigration brought new cultures into the mix, and the clash between different cultures produced conflicts that sometimes led to riots.
It seems like at some point or another every religious or ethnic minority has been the target of a major riot. We see riots against Catholics, against Germans, against Dutch, against Irish, against Mexicans, against Greeks, against Chinese, against Native Americans, against immigrants from India, and against blacks.
As the 19th century wound on, the number of riots in American cities went from two or three per decade to fifteen or twenty per decade, so that almost every year there were at least a few major riots somewhere in the country. And casualty figures for the worst riots climbed from the single digits to the dozens and even in some cases maybe the hundreds.
The racial divide was a major fault-line and recurrent source of deadly riots. The country’s first big anti-Black riot broke out in the 1820s, in Providence RI, followed by even bloodier riots in Cincinnati and Philadelphia. Race riots would be a regular feature of American life for the hundred years, their pace and scale peaking in the early twentieth century.
In 1908 a race riot would shake Abraham Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield Illinois, just months before it was set to celebrate the centennial of his birth. Over the course of two days at least two black citizens were killed by a rampaging mob, while many more were beaten, black owned businesses were vandalized, and the entire black residential area was burned to the ground.
With the end of World War I and the demobilization of the American military machine, job competition and labor conflict exacerbated the tensions caused by the Great Migration of Southern blacks to Northern industrial centers. The result was a wave of deadly violence known as the Red Summer of 1919, in which several dozen race riots killed hundreds of people across the US.
The violence was not always completely one sided. In the Chicago riot of 1919, the black neighborhoods were patrolled by armed youth gangs and protected by snipers, so that either a white or a black person caught in the wrong neighborhood was likely to be attacked on sight. But in other cases, the riots might better be described as massacres. For example, exaggerated rumors of a black uprising in Elaine, Arkansas prompted a large mob of whites to attack black sharecroppers. Historians debate the exact number of casualties, but some put the figure as high as 100 sharecroppers dead.
Genocide
The biggest and deadliest riots might also count as small genocides. Sociologist Bradley Campell defines genocide as one-sided, ethnically based mass killing.11 It’s an ancient form of violence. The Hebrew Bible describes genocides during the conquest of the Promised Land, and great empires like those of Assyria, Rome, or the Mongols were often built on the extermination of enemy tribes and nations.
In American history, genocide is most frequent and severe not between white ethnic or religious groups, nor even along the divide between white and black, but along the expanding frontier. On the frontier, a mix of raiding, warfare, and genocide characterizes the relationship between settlers and natives.
Early on, when the strength of the two sides was more even, the natives were capable of mass killings of the colonists. In 1622, a few years after the death of Pocohontas dissolved a marriage alliance between the Virginia colonists and the Powhatan confederacy, the confederacy launched a surprise attack that killed 347 men, women, and children — a third of the entire English population in Virginia.
But as the strength of the colonies grew, the dominant pattern became mass killings of the natives. A few decades after the Powhatan massacred the English, the followers of Nathanial Bacon slaughtered hundreds of natives, including members of groups who had been at peace or even allied with the English. A century after that, in 1763, a frontier militia around Lancaster Pennsylvania exterminated the men, women, and children of a group of Delaware Indians living in colonial territory.
Such incidents only multiplied as the frontier expanded Westward, producing inevitable conflicts between natives and settlers with different cultures, economic systems, and material and political interests.
A great many of these conflicts turn into full scale wars — foreign wars fought by the US army, some of them producing massacres of the kind that victorious armies throughout history have inflicted on their enemies.
But in other cases, we see violence by civilian groups, organizing of their own accord to fight and kill peoples they saw as dangerous savages or lazy thieves.
Killing was not always the main goal or only option. As long as there was a frontier, the settlers could aim for expulsion, and the natives had the option of retreat. In California, though, both sides had run out of frontier, and so settlers made a conscious turn to extermination.
When cattle ranchers moved into California’s Round Valley, their presence disrupted the native Yuki people’s traditional way of making a living by hunting and gathering. The Yuki then began killing or stealing settler’s livestock. This prompted bands of settlers to retaliate by going out on killing expeditions, where they would find a groups or villages of Yuki people and kill them all, including the women and children.12
These ranchers could not offer the excuse given in the Nuremburg trials that they were just following orders, for these were volunteer operations: Small groups of friends and neighbors coming together to spend a day killing 30 to 50 people before heading home for supper. As the conflicts escalated settlers obtained some state funding and formed a larger militia group, the Eel River Rangers, that over the course of several months would kill over 2,000 Yuki.
Rebellion
The examples I’ve given so far are mostly what we can call downward violence, committed by a group with greater wealth, numbers, or authority against those with less of these things. And it seems like many of the worst extremes of violence happen when those of high social stature act against those lower on the social scale.
But let’s not ignore that quite often violence flows in the opposite direction, and that this violence can be brutal and severe as well.
When Jamestown, the capital of Virginia and oldest English settlement in America, was burned to the ground in 1676, it wasn’t by the neighboring Indian tribes — it was by an uprising of indentured servants, small-holding farmers, and lesser gentry against the colony’s aristocratic government.
Few now remember it, but just a decade before the Revolutionary War, a small army of Scots Irish frontiersmen — the ancestors of many Appalachian hillbillies — marched on Philadelphia, intending to do violence to the Quaker government. They were only stopped at the last minute by some very deft negotiating on the part of a Benjamin Franklin.
Obviously, the American Revolution itself was an act of rebellious, upward violence. But the run-up to revolution proper was a series of civilian riots against authority figures. The Stamp Act led to angry groups of citizens attacking the homes and families of British officials. And the incident that patriots spun as the Boston Massacre might fairly be described as panicked British soldiers firing into a mob that was beginning to riot against them.13
Nor did the Revolution spell the end of violent insurrection in the newly formed US. Less than a decade after the Revolution came Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts, where indebted citizens attempted to capture a government armory. A few years later, farmers on the western frontier would lead the Whiskey Rebellion to protest taxation by their new continental government. The 1840s brought us the Dorr Rebellion, in which landless citizens rebelled against the state government of Rhode Island to demand an expansion of the franchise.
Nor did slaves in Southern plantations always quietly endure their situation. In 1831 a charismatic slave named Nat Turner, claiming to receive visions from God, formed a conspiracy among his friends on a Virginia plantation. When the appointed day came, they launched their attack on the plantation owners. Turner was clear that until the rebels had a secure foothold, no whites could be spared. He and his compatriots killed not only the men but the women and children, even infants in their cribs. They would kill sixty before their rebellion was crushed by the local militia.
Fast forward to the turn of the 20th century and we enter the great age of industrial conflict, with labor unions and big businesses locked in an often-violent struggle. In West Virginia this took the form of conflicts between the United Mine Workers Union and the coal mine operators.14
The violence first flared up during the Cabin Creek and Paint Creek strikes of 1912 and 1913. Coal companies hired private detectives to evict thousands of striking miners from their homes, prompting a force of 6,000 armed miners to march on the mine with intent to kill the guards. The violence was halted by the governor declaring martial law. But another, bigger conflict would soon erupt.
In 1921, after the mine’s private detectives ambushed and killed a pro-Union police chief, an organized force of over 10,000 armed miners clashed with company gunmen in the Battle of Blair Mountain. Before it was suppressed by the US Army, the battle would involve machine guns, aerial bombardment, and by some estimates over 100 dead.
At the US moved into the Civil Rights era in the 1960s, the country experienced a new kind of race riot, not the anti-black pogroms of forty years before, but ghetto riots carried out by black citizens against the police and government.
During the Long Hot Summer of 1967 America’s cities experienced 150 riots. Though generally less deadly than the downward riots of a previous generation, this wave of mass violence still resulted in over 80 deaths, including police, firemen, national guardsmen, the rioters themselves, and bystanders caught in the crossfire.
When Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, another wave of ghetto riots swept the country, killing 43.
In addition to killing people, the riots helped change the urban landscape as businesses were gutted and burned, property values plummeted, and people of means left for safer places.
The protest and youth movements of the late sixties spawned more organized violence as well. The Black Liberation Army, a revolutionary group aiming to overthrow the US government, had about fifty members at its peak. While it was very loosely organized, it managed to carry out a campaign of assassination against the police across several states.
Other revolutionary terrorist groups also proliferated in the late 60s and early 70s. In 1972 alone there were over a thousand domestic bombings in America. The Puerto Rican separatist group FALN bombed a popular Wall Street restaurant, killing several diners and severely maiming many more, and went on to bomb multiple cities in America over the next decade. The bombing campaign of the Marxist group Weatherman started with failed attempts at mass killings of police and soldiers before switching to nonlethal protest bombings against such targets as the US Capitol and the Pentagon. Still other revolutionary groups of the time conducted bank robberies, assassinations, and kidnappings.15
Feuds and Gang Wars
Finally, in addition to upward and downward violence, we also see violence between groups that are relatively evenly matched. Often the result is that attacks go back and forth over relatively long periods of time in a cycle of vengeance. The classic family feud has this pattern, with the parties nursing their vendettas for years or decades as they trade killings.
The most famous feud in American history straddled the border of West Virginia and Kentucky. Depending how you date the beginning of it, the Hatfield-McCoy feud lasted about ten years and claimed a dozen lives in a series of executions, raids, and ambushes.
Feuding is a practice with deep roots. Appalachia was settled by the Scots Irish, a people from the once-lawless borderlands between Scotland and England. Here families had been fighting feuds for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.16 Most American blood feuds happened in the region settled by their descendants, from the Appalachian Mountains down into Texas. They heydey of feuding was in the second half of the 19th century. Kentucky alone saw a half dozen feuds. There was also the Tutt-Everett feud in Arkansas in the 1840s, the Sutton-Taylor feud in Texas in the 1870s that killed 35 men, and the Brooks-McFarland feud in Oklahoma that lasted until 1902.
Sometimes these feuds spun out into larger scale conflicts, as other familied and even government officials joined in one side or the other. Kentucky’s Martin-Tolliver feud is sometimes referred to as the Rowan County War, because by its end a majority of the county’s male population as actively involved on one side or the other.
Out along the Western frontier large factions fought other kinds of small-scale wars. There were at least a half dozen events called Range Wars, where cattle ranchers and their supporters clashed with one another over rights to cows, land, or water sources. Opposing business interests in Lincoln County, New Mexico, fueled a large-scale conflict known as the Lincoln County War, in which armies of 30 to 60 gunfighters fought repeated battles in and around the town of Lincoln.
American cities also gave rise to another pattern of feudlike violence: Clashes of rival street gangs.
Gang violence has been part of American cities since at least the early nineteenth century, when rival ethnic and political gangs clashed in New York’s dangerous Five Points area.
Two of the most feared were the Dead Rabbits, an Irish immigrant gang, and the Bowery Boys, a nativist, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic gang. What historians call the Dead Rabbits Riot of 1857 is more properly described as an all-out, city-wide gang war between these two factions. The clash lasted two days and killed at least eight.
Such gang clashes became a recurring feature of American cities as the country urbanized. Waves of immigration created new ethnic enclaves, many of which generated their own ethnically based gangs. Irish gangs, German gangs, Italian gangs, Jewish gangs. The Chinatowns of Los Angelese, San Francisco, and New York produced the Tongs, who around the turn of the 20th century would fight a series of violent conflicts known as the Tong Wars. And 1970s Los Angeles saw the birth of two prominent black gangs, the Bloods and the Crips, whose name and symbols would soon crop up in the black neighborhoods of several American cities.
Violence as Moralism
What sense can we make of this violent history? What leads people to join in a lynch mob, set fire to buildings in a riot, or brawl with enemy gangs in the streets?
One theme we see is that such violence usually starts with a grievance. Someone has accused someone else of a crime or offense. There has been an outrage, an injustice. To use a concept from sociologist Donald Black, mob violence is moralistic in nature, punishing those the perpetrators define as deviant — as criminals, rebels, oppressors, or some other category of wrongdoer.17
This observation has scientific significance. It suggests that much violence, even violence we would define as crime, belongs in the same social category as other ways that people handle grievances or respond to alleged wrongdoing. When we study it, we should study it with reference to these other reactions: Why do people form a mob rather than turn to police and courts? Why do they handle the alleged deviant with violence rather than making them pay restitution? And why do they sometimes extend the blame to an entire social category, punishing all members of a community for the crimes of a few?
It can also help us in understanding what might first seem incomprehensible. How can people do such evil things? Don’t they have any sense of right and wrong?
Well, any large crowd might have a few true psychopaths in the mix. But by and large the people committing such mob violence aren’t doing it because they lack morality, but precisely because they have it. Indeed, it’s the same moral impulses that lead us to condemn the perpetrators — and to think that if one of them was standing before us we would sure like to punch them in the face — that drives the acts in the first place. Humanity’s capacity to judge and punish, to feel outrage and righteous anger, to be convinced of our justness and the injustice of others, lay behind much slaughter and destruction.
For no one in history thinks he is the bad guy. And some of the most extreme examples of immorality arise not because everyone involved throws moral judgement to the wind, but because they make judgements harshly and one-sidedly.
Mob justice is justice of both zeal and haste, with no patience for limitations like due process or rules of evidence. How can one talk about courts and law when a man has been killed, a woman raped, or when dangerous enemies are plotting our doom? Have you no sympathy for the victim? Are you secretly a deviant yourself?
Violence and Social Distance
Another common theme in this violence is that it tends to be more common and more severe across long social distances. Indeed, Donald Black proposes this as a general feature of moralism: It grows more severe with distance — more uncompromising, more punitive, and more violent.18
In American history, cultural divisions between different religions and ethnic groups produce friction and conflict. And when conflict erupts for whatever reason, cultural distance appears to encourage more extreme reactions.
The borders between settler culture and Native American culture were bloody and genocidal from early on. Deadly urban riots began in earnest with the first big waves of immigration in the 1800s. And much lynching, vigilantism, and terrorism have targeted those of different racial, ethnic, or religious backgrounds.
It is historically unusual for large numbers of very different cultures to interact in close proximity, and learning to manage the conflicts that cross racial and ethnic divides isn’t a trivial task for any diverse society.
One factor that might mitigate collective violence, even among diverse people, is the presence of social ties. Personal relationships are a kind of social closeness that can reduce collective violence.
Even relatively distant and contractual relationships, like those between buyer and seller or employer and employee, often act to deter violence or limit its scope. For example, some California ranchers who employed Yuki Indians defended them from genocidal killing parties.19 Likewise, black citizens in the Jim Crow South well knew the importance of having an employer or other prominent white person who was willing to vouch for them if they got into trouble.20
Closer ties, like intermarriage between groups, further help reduce collective violence. Rates of intermarriage between settlers and natives and were far higher among the trappers of New France than among the farmers of New England or Tidewater, and the frequency and scale of violence differed accordingly.
Ties of intimacy and interdependence seem especially important for reducing the tendency to treat all members of a social category as equally guilty of some offense or injustice.21 Attitudes like “blacks are all lazy,” “whites are all racist,” “Irish are all violent,” or “Republicans are all stupid” are hard to hold when the structure of one’s relationships forces one to recognize different individuals with different personalities, different virtues and failings.
Polarization
A major part of why collective violence is collective is that, whatever the original offense or outrage, people are prone to take sides. Taking sides is something that comes as naturally to human as to chimpanzees. It colors whose side of the story we believe, and people can be incredibly credulous about the accusations of a friend or ally against a stranger or enemy.
Who takes whose side is conditioned by patterns of social distance and social solidarity.22 To adapt a phrase from sociologist Mark Cooney, the dark side of strong communities is that as supportive as they are of their members, they can be extremely harsh toward outsiders.23 Indeed, the two things often go hand in hand: If an outsider commits a crime against an insider, we support our own by punishing the one who hurt them. Southern lynch mobs were especially prone to attack strangers, such as migrant laborers who had recently arrived in town, and especially if they were accused of harming a local.24
Oddly enough, one thing that builds solidarity is conflict with outsiders. The Russian invasion of Ukraine might have done more to create a strong Ukrainian national identity than any event in recent history.
So we can see an oddly self-reinforcing process in human conflict. Conflict can increase social distance between communities, as people avoid what they increasingly see as dangerous enemies in the other group. And it can increase solidarity within communities, as people increasingly rally together in a situation of us versus them.
If the conflict drags on, supporters on each side will share more and more stories of the horrible outrages committed by the other. Some stories are accurate, some are exaggerations, some are just lies. But as the conflict polarizes, people are little interested in such subtleties. They strive to outdo one another in displays of loyalty to the ingroup and hostility to the outgroup. And the outgroup is doing the same.
Once they get going, such cycles of polarization can be difficult to bring to a halt. They may eventually peter out as partisans run out of material or emotional fuel for the conflict or be deescalated by some neutral third party who helps the sides achieve peace.25
Conclusion
The three themes I just mentioned don’t exhaust the patterns we can find in the study of collective violence, but our time here is limited. In any case, perhaps they’re enough for you to see some value in studying this history of violence. For while I claim no expertise in social engineering — indeed, I can barely run my own life — I think one can see how studying these patterns of violence provides some clues for encouraging peace.
Cultural distance is inevitable in a diverse society, and solidary communities have many benefits. One way to keep the benefits of diversity and solidarity while muting the dangers is to foster cross-cutting ties across societies various divisions, be they ethnic or religious or political. Any institutional arrangements that encourage peaceful cooperation, and the chance for real ties of interdependence and intimacy to develop, would work against the extremes of violence.
So too would any institutional arrangements that allow those locked in a cycle of escalation to resort to peacemaking by a neutral party. Along these lines, there have been some experiments in reducing gang violence by funding community peacemakers whose entire goal is cooling off angry belligerents before they seek vengeance.
Finally, I might note that there are lessons here for each of us personally. For while my approach to this subject is scientific, these observations about violence have moral significance as well.
They suggests we be on guard lest our own zeal for justice lead us to commit injustice in its name, making us quick to believe accusations without evidence, to be impatient with due process, or to think that no punishment is too cruel for those we see as evil.
As the Biblical book of Proverbs says, “There is a Way that Seemeth Right to a Man, But its End is the Way to Death.”26
Let us all take care that what seems right to us in our anger and outrage isn’t something that would shame our descendants when they look on it with cooler tempers and the benefit of hindsight.
Thank you for your time.
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Footnotes:
Senechal de la Roche, Roberta. 1996. “Collective Violence as Social Control.” Sociological Forum 11(1): 97-128.
Senechal de la Roche, Roberta. 2001. “Why Is Collective Violence Collective?” Sociological Theory 19(2): 126-144.
Pfeifer, Michael J. The Roots of Rough justice: Origins of American Lynching. University of Illinois Press, 2011.
Brundage, William Fitzhugh, ed. 1997. Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South. UNC Press Books.
Beck, E. M., and Stewart E. Tolnay. 1997. "When Race Didn’t Matter: Black and White Mob Violence Against Their Own Color." Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South: 140.
Zesch, Scott. "Chinese Los Angeles in 1870-1871: The Makings of a Massacre." Southern California Quarterly 90, no. 2 (2008): 109-158.
This definition too comes from Senechal de la Roche (cited in note 1).
See Pfeifer, cited in note 3.
Also following the definition of Senechal de la Roche (note 1).
Gilje, Paul A. "The Baltimore riots of 1812 and the breakdown of the Anglo-American mob tradition." Journal of Social History 13, no. 4 (1980): 547-564.
Campbell, Bradley. The geometry of genocide: A study in pure sociology. University of Virginia Press, 2015.
Campbell, cited in note 10.
Gilje, Paul A. Rioting in america. Indiana University Press, 1999.
Wheeler, Hoyt N. "Mountaineer mine wars: An analysis of the West Virginia mine wars of 1912–1913 and 1920–1921." Business History Review 50, no. 1 (1976): 69-91.
Burrough, Bryan. Days of rage: America's radical underground, the FBI, and the forgotten age of revolutionary violence. Penguin, 2015.
Otterbein, Keith F. "Five feuds: An analysis of homicides in eastern Kentucky in the late nineteenth century." American Anthropologist 102, no. 2 (2000): 231-243.
Black, Donald. The social structure of right and wrong. Academic Press, 2014. See also Black, Donald. 2004. “Violent structures.” Pp. 145-158 in Violence: From Theory to Research, edited by Margaret A. Zahn, Henry H. Brownstein, and Shelly L. Jackson. Newark, New Jersey: LexisNexis / Anderson Publishing.
See work by Black cited in note 13.
From Campbell, note 10.
From Senechal de la Roche, notes 1 and 2.
See Senechal de la Roche, note 1.
See the chapter “Taking Sides” in The social structure of right and wrong (cited in note 13).
Cooney, Mark. "The dark side of community: Moralistic homicide and strong social ties." Sociological Focus 31, no. 2 (1998): 135-153.
See note 2.
Collins, Randall. "C-escalation and D-escalation: A Theory of the Time-dynamics of Conflict." American Sociological Review 77, no. 1 (2012): 1-20.
I’m aping Bradley Campbell’s use of this verse to make a similar point in his book Geometry of Genocide (note 10).